Refugee Migration and the Politics of Redistribution: Do Supply and Demand Meet?

Abstract

We study whether establishing new asylum-seeker centres influences the redistribution related policy positions of candidates in local elections in Finland-a country where municipalities have significant control over fiscal policies. The sudden and unprecedentedly large inflow of the asylum seekers in autumn 2015 and the resulting establishment of asylum centres facilitates a difference-indifferences research design. We focus on the supply side of redistributive politics and find that on average candidates do not respond to the presence of the centres by proposing less (or more) redistribution in a voting aid application survey. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even fairly small effects both for all the candidates and the elected ones. In contrast, on the demand side, there is evidence of various voter responses on average suggesting that electoral politics may limit to some extent the impact of voter preferences on such policies. However, in the very smallest municipalities where there are many refugees per capita we find that also the candidates become less favourable towards redistribution. In other words, intensity of exposure to refugee migration seems to be behind any observed supply-side response regarding redistribution.

First Time Around: Local Conditions and Multi-Dimensional Integration of Refugees

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Caught in crises: Syrian refugees in Türkiye’s labor market

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